CHAPTER 2 SRI DA AVABHASA: The import of My Appearance here
is not that I have Come into the world and that I Am Love,
or that God independent of human beings is Love. The import
of My Appearance here and of My Communication is that you,
and every being, must be Love. The heart is in bondage until love is incarnated in the
world. Therefore, you must incarnate love. You must make
room for Me in life. The first principle of Spiritual life is God-Love,
submission to the Divine Being. First you must love Me, and
then you are able to love everyone. Your practice of the Way
of the Heart is thus a paradox. It is not exclusive
withdrawal into an orientation to the Divine Reality. There
must be that orientation, yes, but your Realization of the
Divine must be incarnated in the plane of relations. * * * The relationship to Me, the True Heart-Master, is the
epitome and the primary form of relationship. And that
relationship contains hidden within it the whole Mystery and
Form of Truth. But it cannot be enjoyed or understood apart
from the practical or sacrificial application of your life
to the whole condition of relationship as it everywhere and
every moment appears. Therefore, practice of the Way of the Heart is the
practice of relationship to Me, but also the practice of the
condition of relationship itself. That is why I Give
practical Instruction in the form of life-demands. The
Spiritual Master must be the Master of actual conditions.
Thus, I am always bringing My devotee into appropriate
conditions, to test and mature him or her. In every
circumstance, My devotee will either function in
relationship openly, effectively, wisely, and with love, or
My devotee will observe his or her own resistance,
understand, and gradually restore himself or herself to the
relational condition in that area of his or her functional
life. The practical living of the conditions of relationship is
of fundamental importance, and it is a fundamental
expression of the process of true practice at every
developmental stage of the Way of the Heart. Love all your friends. Love all beings. Through
devotional submission to Me as your True Heart-Master, be
Liberated from all otherness, which is painful, a form of
suffering, something to be Liberated from entirely. How can
you be Liberated from otherness? Only through
feeling-Contemplation of Me. You must become responsible as love in all relations,
under all conditions, and as early in your life as possible,
so that you can transcend the repetitive destiny of the ego,
of separation, of the avoidance of relationship, of un-love,
of “you don’t love me”, that keeps you out by the pond,
meditating on yourself like Narcissus. Then you can go on to
fulfill the Destiny of Divine Self-Realization while
alive. * * * Every being must fulfill the Law, regardless of his or
her past. It does not make any difference how difficult it
is for you. The Law remains the Law. The Law is unobstructed
feeling-attention, or love, under all conditions and in all
relations until Divine Translation. If you are obstructed in
feeling and attention, you fail to fulfill the Law. That is
why you suffer, and why you stop growing. * * * If you understand My Wisdom-Teaching of the Way of the
Heart, you understand that the ego that is to be transcended
exists only in the context of relations. The ego is the
body-mind in the state of contraction. Therefore, it is
effective as contraction in the field of relations. And,
therefore, among the primary disciplines in the Way of the
Heart, among the most fundamental disciplines, are those in
the domain of relations. * * * Those who Fail To Practice The Sadhana Of Love In their
intimate emotional-sexual relationships, and In human
relationships Generally, Will, By That Failure, Turn Away
(or Contract) From God (or The Great Condition That Is
Reality Itself). The Dawn Horse Testament * * * Practice of the Way of the Heart is always demonstrated
functionally and in the plane of relations. Therefore, it is
always obvious whether or not you are practicing the Way of
the Heart. If you are Contemplating Me with
feeling-devotion, your practice is obvious. If you are not
Contemplating Me, that is also obvious. You know whether a
person is transcending the ego-bond by how he or she appears
in life, in the moment of relations. Of course, the Way of
the Heart is not about relations. It is simply lived in the
context of relations. The Way of the Heart is about
feeling-Contemplation of Me, or Divine Communion. But it
cannot be lived except in the plane of relations. * * * Among the fruits of the life of understanding are human
ones. Your functional humanity, your ability to love and
live in relationship, is a real test of your
self-understanding. To live in relationship is simply a
process of unobstructed energy, fullness, happiness. Until
you become happy with others, your Spirituality is garbage.
It serves no purpose whatsoever. Self-transcendence is consequential for humanity. It is
not an experience of phenomena that transcend humanity. When
the quality of unreasonable Happiness, prior Fullness, or
genuine life and love is present in an individual, you are
certain of that person. You are healed by that person’s
presence. If you are about Spirituality and you are not about love,
then you are only deluded. To live without love has nothing
whatever to do with Spiritual life. I have known many people
who were very Spiritual, so-called, and who did not know the
first thing about love, had no interest in it, had no
capability for it. They could shine out a little love
selectively here and there, but anyone can do that any
libertine does that. I have known many people who claimed to
be involved in Spiritual life who could not grasp this
principle of love. They could not incarnate it, could not
live with it, could not make humanity out of it, could not
make human life out of it. Such people want to be celibate and wear all the
trappings of religion, but they cannot love. There they
stand in their ridiculous costumes, their eyes rolling up in
their heads, swooning in the Yogic perfume, and they are
nothing but self-obsessed egos. They cannot love, they
cannot submit to love, they cannot accept being loved, and
they cannot love others consistently. They cannot bring
Spirituality into life, into relationship. Therefore, they
are dramatizing the same problems that all egos suffer and
at the same time they are calling themselves
“Spiritual”. I have “Considered” this with you on many, many
occasions. There is no true Spiritual life without incarnate
love that is demonstrated in very practical terms. * * * The true test and proof of a human being is not whether
or not he or she can attain mystical experiences, or
“out-of-body” experiences, or even sophisticated scientific
knowledge and power over the world. The true test is whether
or not any individual human being will exist as love and
persist as love, transcending himself or herself in the
midst of all experience and all knowledge, even when all
experience and all knowledge press upon the individual to be
less than love. You may fantasize that Spiritual life is about living in
caves, wearing your robes, and renouncing everything. Such a
notion is just a dream. It is nonsense. True renunciation is
here, in the body, suffering it, becoming Illumined by
submitting to be a human being. The practice of such true
renunciation is the agony of selfknowledge and knowledge of
another. That practice uses you up, burns you out, and kills you
eventually. But it is better to die from that than from
bacteria or old age or a rotting liver or something to do
with your intestines. Die from the heart-stress. Die from
love. That is what I am Doing. And anybody who follows or
fulfills the Way of the Heart must do the same. You literally depend on other beings for your continuing
existence in this form – not your ultimate existence, or
even your mere vital existence (except that you do depend on
the sexual play of others for your birth), but your human
existence. You cannot exist as a human being for one more
moment without participation in the life that other beings
give to you, and that the whole grand affair of the
manifested world gives to you. When you realize your dependence on the conscious
communication of life from others, then you see the
reasonableness – or, rather, the unreasonableness-of love.
Then, in spite of what the other person seems to be, you
bring your life to him or her in the form of real energy,
real intensity, real attention. The person is enlivened,
then, literally. The person is fed. The food that you take through the mouth is gross and
secondary. The food that you take through the nose is gross
and secondary. These are also necessary forms of food,
generally, but they support a lower organic form of
existence. Many people eat well enough and breathe well
enough, but they are depressed and insane because they do
not communicate through the eyes and through the heart. They
do not enjoy the life-process in its subtle form. To be
present with life to other beings, and to expect their
presence to you, is merely intelligent, not moralistic, not
even a matter of Yoga. You are present to other beings in
the form of a righteous demand for life. You should
absolutely demand life from other people. And you should
finally discover what it is you are demanding of them. It is
life, intensity, love, conscious energy. You absolutely need
it to survive. Therefore, you should cut through all the garbage that
you tend to give other people and absolutely demand that
exchange of love. Settle for nothing less, and settle for
nothing less in yourself. And submit to that righteous
demand from others. To bring your own presence as life to
other beings and to demand it from them is simply an
appropriate discipline, just as it is appropriate to take
meals every day. But you tend to settle for less than life. A smile, a bit
of sex, or a cigarette is sufficient. You do not really
require life from others, yet that is what you need. You
cannot survive in your truly human functions without it. If
all of you here were busy truly loving one another, truly
being present to one another without complication, without
making any assumptions about one another or yourself, you
could live for a long time. Even if you lived for only 20
years, you would be happy, at least on the ordinary human
levels. You would be feeding one another, and you could die
happy-if some day you happen to have to die-because
everybody would be with you. Everybody would be holding your
hand and shooting you full of conscious life. You would be
loved, free, not prevented from Truth. And who cares about
death then? * * To love is to share principal food, to share the energy
of manifested being. The mind is simply a modification of
the conscious elemental, and it does not move down into
life. Only in loving do you permit the life-force, the
life-energy, principal food, to manifest on the functional
human level. Therefore, you can think all you like, but until you love
you do not make the life-force available, you do not feed
others. If your common life, your social life, is
unsatisfactory, it is because there is no communicated
life-force, you are starving, you do not love. Loving is not
just a psychological and personal affair. It is not just
good for psychological health and society. Loving is
absolutely essential for life itself, because it is the
functional manifestation of the life-force, or principal
food. There cannot be any withholding, for any reason
whatsoever, without violating the fundamental functional
demand of human life. Love is not a petty affair. It is not
just better if you love others. It is an absolute demand and
responsibility to love and be free. Only thus do you make
available in human terms the Divine process, and only thus
is anything like the realization of truly human existence
possible. Such true existence depends on love. Then human
life can become elemental and alive. Then the bodies can be
improved and all the rest. But until love is established as
the communicated theatre of human life, there is no
evolution of humanity. Do not just live a moral life. Live a life of love. Love is Unqualified Divine Self-Radiance, without center
or bounds. Since it is without center (ego-self) or bounds
(body, thought-conception-perception, world), Love may not
be willfully presumed or generated. It is a Process Realized
by Grace, progressively, until it is altogether True. The Hymn Of The True Heart Master, Incarnation of Love
